After considerable speculation and anticipation, VMware has finally announced vSphere 5 as part of a major cloud infrastructure launch, including vCloud Director 1.5, SRM 5 and vShield 5. From our first impressions, it is both well worth the wait and merits immediate serious consideration as an enterprise virtualization platform, particularly for existing VMware customers.

The list of features is voluminous, with at least 100 improvements, large and small, but among the features, several stand out as particularly significant as I&O professionals continue their efforts to virtualize the data center, primarily dealing with and support for both larger VMs and physical host systems, and also with the improved manageability of storage and improvements Site Recovery Manager (SRM), the remote-site HA components:

Replication improvements for Site Recovery Manager, allowing replication without SANs

Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) for Storage

Support for up to 1 TB of memory per VM

Support for 32 vCPUs per VM

Support for up to 160 Logical CPUs and 2 TB or RAM

New GUI to configure multicore vCPUs

Storage driven storage delivery based on the VMware-Aware Storage APIs